Changwana! - 16 new DVD reviews this week
- 5 Blu-rays,
2 Criterions, a couple of multi-film boxsets
etc. Some new calendar updates, Part B of our contest with a BIG prize, sales
and more.

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Also New Korean Drama Contest listed on the Contest page
HERE

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ONE VOICE (not Ellsworth
Monkton Toohey): I has an enjoyable week of film viewing with The Furies being the apex. More
westerns surfaced for us with, finally, a respectable edition of High Noonand what about The ProfessionalsBR? - pretty darn sweet pardner'. I have to admit The OrphanageBR
looks gorgeous and Leonard says the audio is even better! The
Blu-ray of There Will Be Blood is the definitive
edition for that award winning film. Criterion comes through again with Before the Rain. The Free Willmay find it's
selective following. Godardians should have enough reason to nab the Optimum Alphaville.

The OrphanageBR- Borrowing elements from Poltergeist, The Innocents, Don't Look Now, The Shining and Somewhere in Time
(have you ever thought of Somewhere in Time as a ghost story?), Bayona and
screenwriter, Sergio Sanchez, have fashioned an intelligent and capable piece of
work that stands on its own as narrative, and is helped by a director who cut
his teeth on the music video genre where a knowledge of editing and art
direction comes in handy for this elemental drama.
Blu-ray Release date: April 22nd, 2008

Icons of Adventure - HAMMER WASN'T JUST
HORROR...The legendary British studio is justly revered for its classic horror
movies but they actually made all kinds of pictures and this first Sony
collection of their best films presents four pulse-pounding adventures - all new
to DVD - three of them starring Hammer icon Christopher Lee. He's at his
snarling best as blood-thirsty buccaneers in the rousing swashbuckers The
Pirates of Blood River and The Devil-Ship Pirates. Then he warms up
for his famed Fu Manchu series by playing an evil Chinese crime lord in The
Terror of the Tongs. Rounding out the set is the rarely-seen The
Stranglers of Bombay based on the chilling true story of how the British
attempted to vanquish the Thuggees the notorious death cult that terrorized
India for centuries. So strap yourself in for the most rip-roaring group of
movies since Errol Flynn laid down his sword! DVD Release Date: June 10th,
2008

Before the Rain - The first film made in
the newly independent Republic of Macedonia, Milcho Manchevski's Before the
Rain crosscuts the stories of an orthodox Christian monk (Gregoire Colin), a
British photo agent (Katrin Cartlidge), and a native Macedonian war photographer
(Rade Serbedzija to paint a portrait of simmering ethnic and religious hatred
about to reach its boiling point. Made during the strife of the war-torn Balkan
states in the nineties, this gripping triptych of love and violence is also a
timeless evocation of the loss of pastoral innocence, and remains one of recent
cinema's most powerful laments on the futility of war. DVD Release Date: June
24th, 2008

The Free Will - Winner of a prestigious
Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival Matthias Glasner's brave and complex
drama contemplates the terror of loneliness and whether love can be a salvation
to damaged psyches. Earning Best Actor awards at both Tribeca and Chicago Jurgen
Vogel stars as Theo a convicted sexual predator who has just been released from
psychiatric detention. His fear of women stirs a profound unfulfilled longing
within him making his reintegration into society an unbearable ordeal. Can hope
exist in his budding relationship with Nettie (Sabine Timoteo) as they embark on
a journey to the limits of free will? DVD Release Date: June 24th, 2008

Ruler of Your Own World - Professional
pickpocket, Bok-Su (the remarkable Yang Dong Geon) and his partner in crime,
"Rookie", can barely remain one gallop in front of the law. Shortly after a
brief prologue, the drama gets under way not long after Bok-Su has been released
from jail. He now lives, begrudgingly, with his father, who has been separated
from Bok-Su's mother for some years. Bok-Su has an even more highly charged
relationship with his mother, who cares for a young boy that we take to be Bok-Su's
half-brother and who himself relates to Bok-Su more as a father than a brother.
Clearly, Bok-Su has "issues" with both parents about their separation and the
grief it has caused them all.

Action - Bruno Martel (Luc Merenda) is an
unstable French actor whose agent gets him an audition for a pornographic film
by a pretentious director. Bruno "saves" his co-star Doris (Susanna Javicoli)
who is obsessed with playing the role of Hamlet's Ophelia. After an attack by a
female punk gang and a stay in an asylum where the staff is crazier than the
inmates, they take to the road with a man who believes he is Garibaldi and
encounters more bizarre characters before the pair end up working at an out of
the way gas station for a wheelchair bound old man and his horny young wife (a
nod to The Postman Always Rings Twice - or
more appropriately, Luchino Visconti's Ossessione).

The Furies - Barbara Stanwyck and Walter
Huston are at their fierce finest in master Hollywood craftsman Anthony Mann’s
crackling western melodrama The Furies. In 1870s New Mexico Territory,
megalomaniacal widowed ranch owner T. C. Jeffords (Huston, in his final role)
butts heads with his daughter, Vance (Stanwyck), a firebrand with serious daddy
issues, over her dowry, choice of husband, and, finally, ownership of the land
itself. Both sophisticated in its view of frontier settlement and ablaze with
searing domestic drama, The Furies is a hidden treasure of American
filmmaking, boasting Oscar™–nominated cinematography and vivid supporting turns
from Judith Anderson, Wendell Corey, and Gilbert Roland. DVD Release Date:
June 24th, 2008

Alphaville - One of Godard's most sheerly
enjoyable movies, a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction in which
tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution turns inter-galactic agent to re-enact the legend of
Orpheus and Eurydice by conquering Alpha 60, the strange automated city from
which such concepts as love and tenderness have been banished. As in Antonioni's
The Red Desert (made the previous
year), Godard's theme is alienation in a technological society, but his shotgun
marriage between the poetry of legend and the irreverence of strip cartoons
takes the film into entirely idiosyncratic areas. Not the least astonishing
thing is the way Raoul Coutard's camera turns contemporary Paris into an icily
dehumanised city of the future.

The Wayward Cloud - As in his earlier film
"The
Hole," Tsai intercuts extravagant musical numbers amidst the
bleak narrative, almost a means for the characters to express their innermost
feelings. These sequences counterpoint the frank sexuality of the film, which is
raw to say the least. The sharp level of absurdity to the graphic nature of
these images goes a long way towards keeping the film from bogging down under
the weight of the serious issues regarding sex, bodies, and the human condition
that Tsai is so deeply exploring here. Like no other filmmaker working today,
his static camera speaks wonders to the isolation and existential crisis that
these characters feel. There is an ongoing motif of intersecting corridors and
hallways--like the skywalk that once was--these are modern rivers destined to
bring people together, but which always fail to unite us. Tsai’s characters are
like clouds drifting aimlessly through life, and the film’s ending which can be
read as what happens when two clouds happen to unite, is about as achingly
beautiful and as wholly disturbing, as anything I have ever seen. DVD Release
Date: June 10th, 2008

High Noon - A Western of stark, classical
lineaments: Cooper, still mysteriously beautiful in ravaged middle-age, plays a
small town marshal who lays life and wife on the line to confront a killer set
free by liberal abolitionists from the North. Waiting for the murderer's arrival
on the midday train, he enters a long and desolate night of the soul as the heat
gathers, his fellow-citizens scatter, and it grows dark, dark, dark amid the
blaze of noon. Writer Carl Foreman, who fetched up on the HUAC blacklist, leaves
it open whether the marshal is making a gesture of sublime, arrogant futility -
as his bride (Kelly), a Quaker opposed to violence, believes - or simply doing
what a man must. High Noon won a fistful of Oscars, but in these days of
pasteboard screen machismo, it's worth seeing simply as the anatomy of what it
took to make a man before the myth turned sour. DVD Release Date: June 10th,
2008

The Professionals
BR - Writer-director Richard Brooks' career had highs and lows but he
was never more on the mark than when he put together The Professionals, a
tightly written and directed adventure that fulfills the spirit of its title in
all departments. A wonderful cast of he-man action heroes handles both the
constant physical exertion and Brooks' slick script with style and grace. And
the cinematography of Conrad Hall gives the film a gloriously colorful desert
setting for 1001 wild gags with gunplay, horses, trains and arrows laced with
sticks of dynamite. Blu-ray DVD Release Date:
June 10th, 2008

There Will Be BloodBR - The movie alludes to Days of Heaven, Giant, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane, but it’s every inch a P.T.
Anderson film. Blood is not a departure from his style (as some have suggested)
but a refinement, seizing on the notions of family and commerce that ran through
Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) and reworking them on a
different plane. Anderson pares down Upton Sinclair’s 1926 muckraking novel Oil!
to an archetypal, even operatic tale of greed and competition, culminating in an
ending that’s as much a shock to the system as the frogs in Magnolia.
Blu-ray DVD Release Date: June 3rd, 2008

Diva - Marvellous amalgam of sadistic
thriller and fairytale romance, drawing on a wild diversity of genres from film
noir to Feuillade serial. The deliriously offhand plot, cheekily parodying
Watergates and French Connections, has switched tapes setting a pair of
psychopathic hoods on the trail of a young postal messenger, turning his
obsessive dream - of romance with a beautiful black opera singer whose
performance on stage he has secretly recorded - into a nightmare from which he
is rescued by a timely deus-ex-machina (clearly a descendant of the great Judex). The most exciting debut in
years, it is unified by the extraordinary decor - colour supplement chic meets
pop art surrealism - which creates a world of totally fantastic reality situated
four-square in contemporary Paris. DVD Release Date: June 3rd, 2008

Infernal Affairs IIBR - The blockbuster thriller, Infernal Affairs,
almost single-handedly revived the Hong Kong gangster film back in 2002. It was
so successful that it spawned two back-to-back sequels before Martin Scorsese's
The Departed, could get the drop on a largely unsuspecting English-speaking
public. The action of Infernal Affairs II provides considerable backstory to the
first movie, fleshing out the early days of the two young moles. At its release,
many regretted the loss of Tony Leung and Andy Lau and - unfairly, I thought -
damned the sequel for their absence. The relative youth and inexperience of
Shawn Yu and Edison Chen, who play the Leung and Lau characters: Yan (think:
DiCaprio) and Ming (Matt Damon) and was seen as unfortunate. Blu-ray Release date: April 25th, 2008

Infernal Affairs IIIBR - IA-III reverts to the fast-paced suspense of the original –
though since we would already have seen the first movie (and that is, I believe,
the order these should be seen in) we know how everything comes out, making it
less of an edge-of-one's sense thriller. On the other hand, most film buffs see
movies they like multiple times, so there you have it! Scorsese apparently
ignored the first sequel altogether, as The Departed makes use of some of the
threads of IA-III, notably the relationship between Yan, Ming and the
psychiatrist, one of the more jarring and least convincing aspects of his
translation. Blu-ray Release date: April 25th,
2008

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be
beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover
that there is no reason." John Cage (1912 - 1992)
Have a healthy week!